Thursday, April 21, 2016

Today is the feast of St. Anselm of Canterbury. His associate and biographer Eadmer relates his deathbed scene. It was Palm Sunday, and one of those clustered around Anselm's bed remarked that it looked as if the archbishop would be celebrating Easter with God, Anselm replied,

"Well, if that's what God wants I'll gladly obey him, but if he prefers to let me stay here long enough to solve the problem of the origin of the soul (which I've been thinking about a great deal lately) I would gratefully accept that opportunity, because I doubt if anyone else is going to solve it once I'm gone."

There is something marvelously scholastic about that remark, almost as good as the deathbed of St. Macrina the Younger, who spent her dying hours debating Platonic philosophy with her brother.

Sunday, April 17, 2016

Saturday, April 16, 2016

Many years ago, the TOFling desired himself to cross the campus quadrangle. It was called a 'quadrangle' because that sounds more academic even than rectangle. Furthermore, it can be nicknamed 'the Quad', whereas a rectangle's nickname is best left to the imagination. In any case, the Quad had been renovated, in the course of which labor paved footpaths had been laid leading from the classroom buildings on one side to those on the other side, students being anxious to travel quickly from class to class. Or to the cafeteria, which also lay on one side.

It did not take long before bare lines through the grass were worn from the tramp of many feet seeking different shortcuts than those allocated by the landscape planner.

Many years later when Interstate 78 was opened, a bridge was thrown across the Delaware. Happily, it landed on each side, thus providing egress from and ingress to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. A billboard went up that read: Pennsylvania: America Begins Here. Now, the planners had intended this to mean 'begin' in a temporal sense-- Independence Hall, the Constitution, Valley Forge. But folks east of the Delaware, in New Jersey, took it in a spatial sense and took umbrage with it. "What are we," New Jerseyans cried, "chopped liver?" The answer to this being "Yes," not much more need be said.

But in pursuance of the beginnings of American, the Delaware River Joint Toll Bridge Commission, known as the DRJTBC, possibly the most unpronounceable acronym a quasi-government instrumentality even coined -- although admirable in its succinct descriptive nature -- placed a Visitor's Center at the toll bridge. (Someone had to pay for that bridge, and it may as well be those who use it.) This was situated in the lower level of the Commission building wherein the toll takers took their ease when not manning the booths. (Or womanning, in some cases. Or cousining in the case of TOF's cousin.)

To access this Visitor's Center, there was an exit ramp off the highway that led to the parking lot. The weary driver could collect brochures, de-vend a machine, rest in the rest room, and so forth. When leaving, the driver would pass through a stand-alone toll booth and rejoin the mighty flow of traffic.

However, it soon became clear that the mighty flow of traffic consisted in large part of mighty tractor-trailers of impressive length, few of which stopped at Visitor Information Centers and were rolling on No-Doz much of the time anyway.

Consequently, the toll taker was more lonely than the Maytag Repairman and about a year after opening, the toll booth was closed and the entrance to the Visitor Center was moved to a hairpin turn immediately after the phalanx of toll booths by which people had to pay to leave New Jersey. See the map above for the layout. The old ramp, now blocked with a metal gate, is not shown.)

Planners gotta plan, but the one thing such Plans have in common is that they never work out according to Plan. The reasons are manifold. They usually involve people, and people are notorious for doing what they want and not what the planners expect. They also involve a static view of the universe, and assume that factors affecting the Plan will never change. That's why so many buildings and other public facilities get reworked shortly after opening. The road gets changed from one-way to two-way -- or vice versa. Facilities get repurposed to other uses. The grand entrance becomes a lobby devoid of receptionists, with a solitary telephone on what had been the reception desk whereby the visitor may announce himself to the proper extension number.

The TOF's hometown there is a cute custom of designating single blocks as one-way. Lincoln Street, for example, is two-way west to Folk St., whereupon it becomes one-way east-bound for a single block. On the next block west, it becomes one-way westbound for several blocks. There was a reason for it, one supposes; but TOF entertains the fantasy that at some point a block will be designated one-way that will result in all the traffic in the city converging on an intersection from which there is no legitimate egress.

Surely, it will be a grand and glorious day when all health insurance is handled by the government -- actually by a single corporation favored by the government. There will be nothing wrong with that Plan, we are sure.

The only way to ensure that the Plan is followed is to enforce the following of it with penalties, fines, and rewards for good behavior. That's why socialist regimes always tend toward the authoritarian however much they might have consisted originally of Earnest Reformers anxious to replace the inequities of the existing system with the inequities of a new one.

Wednesday, April 13, 2016

It would seem that all those medieval torture devices one sees described hither and yon are either a) not medieval, b) not torture devices, or are c) just made up. A discussion can be found HERE:

It's not that the medievals did not use torture, but they were not very imaginative about it. The iron maiden was first described toward the end of the 18th cent.

The pear of anguish is another late fabrication. Supposedly, it was inserted into a bodily orifice and then cranked open. Engineering studies -- let's hear it for engineers! -- showed that the springs were too weak to open up the aforesaid orifices. Fact is, no one knows what the dang thing was for and the Usual Suspects simply imagined that it must have been a torture device because medieval. Speculation is that it was used as a shoe extender, like this more modern torture device:

It might be amusing to select modern devices, suppose that in a few centuries their purpose has been forgotten, and then re-imagine them as torture devices. Such as the double-handed hand burners. Since they have been found in the ruins of many 21st century homes, we assume they were used to discipline children, whose hands were inserted into the slots. Depending on the severity of the infraction, the device could be set to different times.

Then there was the white noise machine which was intended to keep the victim in a state of heightened agitation:

Sunday, April 3, 2016

The Great Boo-Hoo

Among the usual cris de coeur about Western Civilization are the Crusades, a
series of unprovoked and dastardly aggressions against the Religion of Peace.™ These were, in this view, holy wars led by power-mad popes and fought by uncouth
religious fanatics from an overpopulated and resource-poor backward Europe against the peaceful and enlightened Muslim
culture, leaving it in ruins to this day.

Depending upon which generation of occidentophobes we cite, these attacks are said to be due to evil Western capitalistic imperialism-colonialism or to evil Western Islamophobia. In either case, it is a projection of High Modern or Late Modern concerns onto a High Medieval milieu for which they are not exactly good fits. The eleventh and twelfth centuries were not exactly hot times for capitalism -- as Marx in fact knew. And is it really a phobia if someone has been attacking and raiding your lands for four hundred years and you at long last strike back?

Our modern view of the Crusades has been informed by Steven Runciman's influential text, A History of the Crusades. Most people today owe their view of oafish Frankish barbarians disrupting a suave and sophisticated Islamic culture to his work. Runciman greatly admired the Byzantine Empire, and regarded its destruction by the wayward "Fourth" Crusade as "the greatest crime committed against humanity." He delivered himself of this opinion only a decade or so after World War II, too; so it may be true what they say about academics.

Marxist historians accepted that the crusades were imperialistic, but they rejected the idea that they were motivated by idealism. Instead, they argued, the crusades were the result of the growth of medieval European population and a shortage of available resources. The crusades were simply surplus labor seeking new territories for themselves abroad. These ideas meshed well with the increasingly discredited nature of imperialism. Historians who were not themselves Marxist nevertheless accepted the premise that the crusades were the child of avarice and greed, because as imperialistic enterprises, they were clearly exploitative. The crusaders were thus shorn of any semblance of religious motivation.

This view of the crusades was carved into stone with the publication of Sir Steven Runciman's three-volume History of the Crusades (1951-54). It is no exaggeration to say that Runciman single-handedly crafted
the current popular concept of the crusades. The reasons for this are
twofold. First, he was a learned man with a solid grasp of the chronicle
sources. Second, and perhaps more important, he wrote beautifully. The
picture of the crusades that Runciman painted owed much to current
scholarship yet much more to Sir Walter Scott. Throughout his history
Runciman portrayed the crusaders as simpletons or barbarians seeking
salvation through the destruction of the sophisticated cultures of the
east.

The irony is that these 19th century Marxist assumptions were then taught to the Arabs, who had themselves largely forgotten about the crusades, thus creating a whole new set of grievances by which to explain away the repressive backwardness of their regimes. This worked to the advantage of both the regimes and those who wished to overthrow them, and in the latter case suited the agendas of both the nationalists and the Islamists. Previously, the crusades had been a short-lived series of set-backs interrupting a thousand-year long assault on Christendom. Now they became the scapegoat for everything that had gone wrong. Islamic culture, they argued, had never recovered from this unprovoked invasion.

But even Runciman described his work as literature, not history. He wrote in the older tradition of Gibbon, all full of Grandeur and Sweep and Pronouncements, not in the modern tradition of dispassionate and careful examination of the documents of everyday life. Sometimes, if you want to know why people did what they did, it is useful to ask them. They're not always honest, but they may be more accurate than projecting modern concerns back onto them.

To take one example: the Europeans could hardly have mounted these campaigns if there had been a shortage of resources in Europe. It is precisely because of Europe's economic recovery from the dark age of Saracen, Viking, and Magyar assaults -- from the sacking of Rome and the burning of Genoa and the jihadi castles blocking commerce through the passes in the Alps -- that they were able to go out from Europe at all. Europe did not get rich from exploiting the East. The East was a continual drain on her resources, and as time went on it became more and more difficult to find volunteers to risk their lives and fortunes to venture out there.

Likewise, the argument that the muslim world is poor today because of the devastation wrought by the crusades: The crusades never touched most of that world, and in the centuries following the snuffing of the last crusader states, muslim armies took Otranto in Italy preparatory to a march on Rome, conquered the Balkans and Constantinople, and twice approached the Gates of Vienna to menace the center of Europe. The Grand Turk was a very real threat to Europe down to the 1600s.

But even before Runciman wrote his great work, historians were taking another look and were examining the assumptions behind the modern analysis. They found, for example, that far from being landless "second sons" out to strike it rich, most who went on the crusade were important and wealthy barons who mortgaged themselves to the hilt in order to afford the journey. (Remember, they had to pay their own way there and back.) This has been learned by a statistical analysis of the memorials that crusaders posted with their bishops prior to setting out. They did not expect for the most part to be coming back.

Our faith was strong in th’ Orient,
It ruled in all of Asia,
In Moorish lands and Africa.
But now for us these lands are gone
‘Twould even grieve the hardest stone...

-- Sebastian Brant, The Ship of Fools (1494)

The World in 1071

Okay, not the whole world maybe, but the world of the European-Near Eastern ecozone. On the eve of the crusades, that world looked like this.

Penguin Atlas of Medieval History from Columbia.eduDifferent shadings indicate different nationalities of the rulers of each territory. Berber states e.g. have tighter cross-hatching than Arab states.

Hilaire Belloc (1936) described the situation thusly:

They [the muslims] were ultimately thrust back to the Pyrenees, but they continued to hold all Spain except the mountainous north-western corner. They held all Roman Africa, including Egypt, and all Syria. They dominated the whole Mediterranean west and east: held its islands, raided and left armed settlements even on the shores of Gaul and Italy. They spread mightily throughout Hither Asia, overwhelming the Persian realm. They were an increasing menace to Constantinople. Within a hundred years, a main part of the Roman world had fallen under the power of this new and strange force from the Desert.

Such a revolution had never been. No earlier attack had been so sudden, so violent or so permanently successful. Within a score of years from the first assault in 634 the Christian Levant had gone: Syria, the cradle of the Faith, and Egypt with Alexandria, the mighty Christian See. Within a lifetime half the wealth and nearly half the territory of the Christian Roman Empire was in the hands of Mohammedan masters and officials, and the mass of the population was becoming affected more and more by this new thing.

Normans liberating Sicily

By 1071, things had been tidied up somewhat around the edges. Some of the Mediterranean islands had been recovered by the Byzantines or by the Pisans, and the Normans were halfway to liberating Sicily. The jihadi castles were gone from the Alps and the Riviera, and southern Italy had been freed. The Spaniards had begun to debouch from their mountain redoubts. The Byzantines still held the line in Anatolia, despite constant attacks; and Dongola, the northernmost successor state to Nubia (off the bottom of the map), held the upper Nile against the Beni Sulaym colonizers from Arabia who had been Arabizing Upper Egypt. Northern Sudan was still Christian.

Within the House of Submission, the relative pax of the Arab Caliphate of Baghdad had shattered and Berber and Turkish warlords were now in charge with all the fervor of recent converts. The imperialist-colonialist Saljūqs held Persia and Mesopotamia. The Shi'ite Fatimids had come out of North Africa and now ruled in Egypt. When their left-behind Zirid governors had proven too independent back in Mahdi City and ditched the Shi'a for the Sunni, the Fatimids passed along the migrating tribes of the Beni Sulaym (who settled Cyrenaica in 1050) and the Beni Hilal (who colonized Tripolitania and Tunisia in 1051), changing these areas from Berber to Arab and driving the Berbers to the coastal cities. (To this day, "Libya" breaks naturally into these two parts.) The old Umayyad Caliphate of Cordoba had broken up into a score of independent taifas, Arab and Moor, and with it passed the Golden Age of Al-Andalus. Meanwhile, the al-murabitim (Almoravids), Sanhaja Berbers who had recently converted to Islam had flooded out of the Sahara, taken over the Emirate of Fez, and renamed it Marrakesh (Morocco). Shortly, some of the losing taifas in the muslim civil war will invite them to come into Spain to help out. They will, but will then refuse to turn control back over to their Moorish cousins and will make Spain an Almoravid colony.

Turkish warriors: Dude, who took my horse!

The Turks were composed of mutually warring clans and factions, and so they disrupted the pax Arabica that the original muslims had established within the House of Submission. When they took Jerusalem from the Fatimids, they were astonished to find flourishing Christian churches and monasteries. (The "Mad Caliph" who had destroyed the Church of the Holy Sepulcher had been an aberration; his successor had allowed the Byzantines to send architects to restore them.) Like all new converts, the Turks were more muslim than the muslims, so they destroyed churches, murdered clergy, and seized pilgrims for ransom.

A pilgrim with big hands

Then they discovered that Jerusalem was profitable only by dint of the pilgrims she attracted, so they eventually stopped direct persecutions in favor of tolls and taxes. However, fragmented nature of the Turkish realm meant that local petty rulers could do pretty much as they pleased, so the pilgrimages to the Holy Land became more arduous and often fatal. In 1065, when Bishop Gunther of Bamberg led 7000 pilgrims to the Holy Land, only 2000 returned to the Germanies -- after a harrowing siege and rescue by a friendly Fatimid emir.

Pilgrims stopping at an inn

This may seem unbelievable to Late Moderns convinced that no one actually believes in a religion,
but by this point the Europeans were thoroughly spooked. What with the
Mad Caliph, the Saljūq destruction of churches, the attacks on
pilgrims, and all what have you, they had little faith in the ability of
the New Muslims to safeguard the Holy Sites the way the Old Muslims
had. We can imagine them in their pubs and bistros and Bierstuben
grumbling over their pints, "Somebody oughta do something!"

All that was needed was a trigger.

Disaster!

That trigger came on 26 August 1071, when the Turks crushed the Byzantine Roman army on the shore of Lake Van in Armenia: the Battle of Manzikert. While not militarily unrecoverable, the subsequent coup and disorder in the Empire allowed the frontier to collapse. Turkish colonists drove their flocks onto the Anatolian plateau -- and drove the peasants off the land. Anatolia had been the breadbasket of the Empire and its major source of manpower for the army. Without it, the Byzantines recoiled to the coast and the Balkans and could now look out across the Straits and see... "Turkey," in what had once been a Greek and Orthodox country¹ and the ancient land of the Cappadocian Fathers. The sites of three of the first four Ecumenical councils (Nicaea, Ephesus, Chalcedon) were now in muslim hands.

After ten years of chaos, an actually competent emperor, Alexis I Comnenus (1081-1118), rallied the Byzantines and raised a mercenary army against the surrounding barbarians. And he wrote to the Pope begging for Help! He needed fighting men. Soon. Like now?

The Byzantines did not call on the West blithely. In their opinion, all
of the West was Roman territory occupied temporarily by Frankish
barbarians with pretensions. (And when the Normans freed Sicily and Southern Italy from
the muslims, they also kicked out the remaining Byzantine garrisons.)
Furthermore, although Christian, the Westerners were committed to
various liturgical errors and possible doctrinal errors. Then there had been
that matter of mutual excommunication about twenty years ago. A minor
affair; not like it was the first time the two Sees had gotten in a snit
with each other, and the assumption was that things would work out
eventually. Both sides were trying to patch things up at this point.

Dude, where's my Anatolia?! The Fatimids are wondering what happened to Jerusalem. The Armenians are wondering what happened to Armenia: Some have taken refuge in Cilicia (a/k/a "Little Armenia"). The Shi'ites of Alamut are wondering where they can get some more pot and whether they can train more assassins to take out the damned Sunni Turks.

Greg 7

But even before receiving this plea for help, Pope Gregory VII (1073-1085) had made plans to rectify Manzikert. He saw the effort not as a "holy war" but as an errand of mercy and charity. He even envisioned himself at the head of the army and that the subsequent liberation would help reunite the two halves of Christendom now sorely vexed by that excommunication thingie. In his absence, he would entrust the care of the Church to his BFF, Kaiser Heinrich IV. Hank was glad to oblige.

Notes1. Greek and Orthodox. Western and coastal Anatolia remained largely Greek and Orthodox down to the 1920s when, in the wake of WW1, following an unsuccessful Greek attempt to reclaim the region, it was ethnically cleansed by the Turks. They got rid of the Armenians too around the same time.

The Crusade That Didn't Happen

But Greg was a Reformer™, and the first step to quenching clerical abuses was to remove the kings from control of the clergy. So he issued a "Declaration of Independence" for the Church. From now on, only the Church could invest her bishops: no kings, emperors, or presidents need apply. Hank did not take the separation of Church from State well. (Oddly enough, the first thing the Protestant Reformers did, centuries later, was return their churches to secular control.)

Matilda moderates the agreementbetween Hank and Greg

So Hank declared Greg a papal booger-head and the nobles of Germany said, in very loud whispers, maybe we need a new emperor and Hank went off to ask Greg for forgiveness. Greg left town before Hank could catch him and bunkered up in the castle of Canossa, held by the redoubtable warrior, la gran contessaMatilda of Tuscany, Imperial Vicar and Vice-Queen of Italy.¹ But Hank tracked him down and pulled off a PR coup.

He approached as a barefoot penitent, knelt in the snow before the gates, and prayed admittance. Faced with this religious end run, Greg had no choice but to forgive him and lift the excommunication. He and Hank and Tilly had communion together. This cut the legs off the nobles' rebellion, which did not please them.

Matilda's castles

Afterward, of course, Greg held firm to the separation of Church from State, so Hank raised an army and came after him. Matilda called up her levies and blocked the passes of the Apennines against the emperor.² Eventually, however, Greg was driven into exile and died there.³

Meanwhile, the whole mission to the east was put on the back burner.

Notes:1. La gran contessa. In her own right. Christendom was the first civilization in which women could be equal players in the public square.2. Matilda. Her prominent role in supporting the pope against the emperor has led some Late Moderns (can we say "Wikipedia"?) to suggest Greg and Tillie were getting it on. They can imagine no other reason, apparently, than pelvic ones; another example of how we project our own obsessions onto the past.3. Canossa. Some people think that the Canossa episode demonstrates that the medieval Church dominated the secular powers. Yeah, right. That's the problem with superficial, stereotyped theories of history.

Let's Get Back on Track Here

Urban renewal

Where were we? Oh, yes. Roman Empire called for help. West got sidetracked with the Investiture Controversy. In 1095, Alex sends an envoy to ask, Where are you guys? Hello? New pope Urban II holds a council at Clermont in November of that year. At a broader gathering outside the council (which was largely concerned with church matters) he addressed the problems of the Eastern Christians and called on the Western knights to go to their assistance. The text of his address (which varied from place to place) does not survive, but we have accounts written by others in the audiences. Robert the Monk tells us:

They [the Turks] have completely destroyed some of God’s churches and they have converted others to the uses of their own cult. They ruin the altars with filth and defilement. They circumcise Christians and smear the blood from the circumcision over the altars or throw it into the baptismal fonts. They are pleased to kill others by cutting open their bellies, extracting the end of their intestines, and tying it to a stake. Then, with flogging, they drive their victims around the stake until, when their viscera have spilled out, they fall dead on the ground. They tie others, again, to stakes and shoot arrows at them; they seize others, stretch out their necks, and try to see whether they can cut off their heads with a single blow of a naked sword. And what shall I say about the shocking rape of women?

This, and not promises of plunder, got folks riled up. Granted, he also urged the knights to stop fighting one another in Europe and turn their swords outward, but this was not the motive for the call. But he also shifted the focus from simply the liberation of Anatolia to the liberation of Jerusalem.

This was an age of relics and pilgrimages, and no place was more relic-heavy than Jerusalem, where Jesus himself had done his thing. Bad enough that the Arabs had taken it from the Byzantines four hundred years ago. At least they had allowed the pilgrims to come and go unmolested, for a fee. But the new situation was intolerable. It being a feudal age, the whole thing was cast in feudal terms. A vassal is pledged to assist his lord in recovering his lands, and everyone is vassal to Jesus, the lord of all. So how much more are we obligated to recover his lands!

"Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me." (Matt 16:24)

Deus vult! the crowds shouted. God wills it!

Of course, Late Moderns wonder if anyone actually raised such a cry. They cannot imagine it really meant anything to the people of the era, since it means nothing to them today.

Pilgrim's Progress

So the whole thing became a pilgrimage! It was imagined as an errand of mercy and charity. Everyone taking part took a pilgrim's vow to visit the Holy Sepulcher. Because of the great expense and hardships of the journey, each pilgrim was granted a remission of sin -- just as any pilgrim to any shrine would. His lands were placed under the protection of the Church until his return. Additional vows dealt with fasting, abstinence from sex, particular devotions to be performed along the way, etc. A pilgrim's cross was sewn to the shoulder of his tunic.

Armed pilgrimages were not a novelty, given the unsettled times. But this time around, the pilgrims were not only armed but trained in the use of arms. And there were a lot of them. Their oath was sworn to God, not to the pope or to any secular leader. In fact, none of the "cross-bearers" was actually in command. There was no hierarchy, no organization. It was a mass of several thousands of armed pilgrims heading more or less in the same direction with more or less the same purpose. Lords among the pilgrims could expect to command their own vassals, but no one else. They would elect a commander-in-chief as was customary, but the post was largely honorary and like any large feudal levy there would be much time spent negotiating issues of precedence and honor. No feudal lord worth his fief was going to take stinking orders from a peer! It was a very libertarian era, in a way.

Naturally, as among any large group of people, there were those who ran to the contrary. Knights on the run, robber barons, those out to get rich, those out to impress the troubadours. But they were the exceptions, not the rule. The arduousness of the journey weeded out all but the most serious and committed.

Christendom was aroused. They were pumped! The Vikings and Magyars had been tamed. The cities had been rebuilt. New
northern trade routes had replaced the lost Mediterranean ones. The
moldboard plow, horse collar, and three-field rotation had unloosed an
agricultural cornucopia from the heavy northern soils. As global warming set in, the growing season expanded and more and more land was brought under the plow. At Bologna, in the Holy Roman Empire, a new word was coined: "university." A second like it was formed in Paris, on the Left Bank, and about the time of this commentary, a third, at Oxford, was starting up. Formal charters would come later. Meanwhile, let's see if we can find copies of these Greek books the Latins mentioned. The Byzantines must have some.

After four hundred years of taking it on the chin, of seeing their heartlands seized, their cities raided and sacked, their churches burned and priests killed, and more recently (with the fervent Turks and Moroccans) a renewed intensity of persecution, Christendom was finally going to strike back! A wave of enthusiasm spread over their mountain fastnesses, their fortresses and towns. Those taking the vow included women, the aged, the infirm, clergy, and Spaniards, and some rhetoric was expended to discourage them from going. (Spaniards, in particular, were needed at home for their own crusade, and the others might sorta get in the way.) But since it was a pilgrimage and not a war, it was hard to forbid anyone from trying and the prohibitions were often honored in the breach. Still, you could wear the pilgrim's cross as one of "those that pray."

Except the Spaniards had picked up this weird idea of a "holy war" from the folks they had been fighting with to recover their country.